The Devil's Stronghold

by Leslie Ford

  Persons this Mystery is about—

  GRACE LATHAM,

  a good-humored widow, who is a sort of Typhoid Mary where murder is concerned, is called to Hollywood to try to restrain her student son from making a fool of himself.

  COLONEL PRIMROSE,

  whose chief concerns are Mrs. Latham and murder investigations, has black. X-ray eyes and a bland manner, behind which is a mind as alert as a hound dog at a rabbit hole.

  BILL LATHAM,

  Mrs. Latham’s son, clean-cut, straightforward, isn’t the type to make an ass of himself over anything, but now he seems to be doing just that.

  MOLLY McSHANE,

  a student at U.C.L.A., is being groomed by Bill and Sheep Clarke to be a movie star. Neck-deep in something, but few know what, her personality alternates between that of a vicious tiger kitten and a shorn little lamb.

  SHEEP CLARKE,

  Bill’s pal, is a student and a waiter at the Casa del Rosal. He is for Molly and he doesn’t care who knows it. However, he says he doesn’t love her.

  VIOLA KERSEY,

  star of the silent screen, can’t remember whether she’s tossed two or three husbands in the marital garbage can. Viola would like to make a come-back but doesn’t know how to do it.

  LUCILLE GANNON,

  a producer’s wife, is a time-worn glamour girl who races through life at breakneck speed. Twice she has kicked over the traces and left two decent husbands gasping.

  GEORGE (GEE GEE) GANNON,

  Lucille’s third husband, is supposedly hiding in the Casa del Rosal while he works on a new script.

  EUSTACE (STINKY) SYPE,

  a writer whose nickname aptly describes his personality, apes the oriental in appearance and living.

  ROSE SHAVIN,

  maid at the Casa, seems to have taken Molly under her wing. She is stern and brooks no nonsense.

  MORRY SHAVIN,

  Rose’s husband, looks like an unobtrusive little mole who has taken to flight watching at the Casa to avoid sunshine.

  What this Mystery is about—

  … TWO MURDERS and a NEAR-SUICIDE in a Hollywood hotel … The WRONG CORPSE at the foot of a stone stairway … A LETTER which frightens a mother into heading for Hollywood posthaste … A TELEPHONE exuding sinister rasping sounds at measured intervals … Several puzzles surrounding a length of GREEN STRING … An EVENING BAG that, by being left in a telephone booth, fouls up a murder … SMALL DOGS sitting like so many little statues near a body … A blood-stained BAYONET… A mass of CHARRED PAPER belonging to a dead man … A fantastic CHINESE ROOM that is the scene of grisly events … A DIAMOND BRACELET buried for years … A SCENARIO containing gag techniques for murder which prove to be horribly effective.

  Wouldn’t You Like to Know—

  Why Lucille thought Grace’s son was making a complete ass of himself?

  The meaning of the sinister and puzzling doings which dogged Grace’s first hours in Hollywood?

  Why an intended victim should try so desperately to cover up for the murderer?

  Why the movie script had to be burned immediately upon the death of its possessor?

  Why Molly McShane turns tiger at any mention of the woman who wants to make her a movie star?

  How a curious personal habit is the indirect means of a ghastly death?

  YOU will learn the answers as with Mrs. Latham and Colonel Primrose you try to solve this fascinating mystery which has a Hollywood locale plus malevolence in concentrated doses and death—the devil’s stronghold.

  A COLONEL PRIMROSE MURDER MYSTERY

  THE

  DEVIL’S

  STRONGHOLD

  By LESLIE FORD

  Copyright, 1948, by Leslie ford. Copyright, 1948, by The Curtis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, N.Y.

  The Devil’s Stronghold

  Chapter One: SOS from Hollywood

  THE YELLOW MATCH BOOK was lying on the seat of the taxicab. I saw it as the doorman at Garfinckel’s bowed me in with a punctilio worthy of the wife of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. “How you feelin’, Miz Latham?” he asked. “How them two boys gettin’ on these days?”

  I recognized him then; it was the uniform that had blinded me. He was some kind of a cousin of my Lilac’s, and a former neighbor in Georgetown. I was pleased to see him again.

  “I’m fine, Boston, and the boys are too. Bill’s out of the Navy and going to California Tech. You must come and see him when he gets home for Christmas. How are you?”

  Boston was fine, and he’d certainly come and see Bill, who must have grown up considerable by now. He was so right—and at the moment I was so unaware of howl right he was.

  He held the taxi door open while I picked up the yellow matches. “It’s a smutty day,” he said. “That ol’ cloud goin’ to bust himself, any minute now.”

  He was right again. It was one of those poisonously hot late September days in Washington that usually end in a futile thunderstorm. I wouldn’t, otherwise, have bothered to pick up the match book, but with everything else sticking to me I could do without a yellow-stain on my white dress.

  I gave the driver my address on P Street in Georgetown. It was then I saw what was scrawled on the match book, as if someone had made a hurried note. The Devil’s Stronghold, it said. It seemed an astonishing notation. I suppose I could have thought of it as premonitory, some way, but experience has shattered all faith in my premonitions, and Hollywood to me was still only a fantastic other world I read about at hairdressers, or on the front page when its bizarre antics made it front page news. And I don’t mean to imply that Hollywood is the Devil’s Stronghold. Startled by that sinister note on the cover of the yellow match book, I automatically opened it. Inside was written, in the same hurried scrawl: Death is the Devil’s Stronghold. Nothing more, nothing less—a simple statement of basic truth. And its only connection with any geographical place is that Hollywood, California, turned out to be the proving ground for the basic truth I’d picked up in Washington—and tossed onto the floor of the cab right away, being in no mood then for basic truths of any kind.

  All I wanted to do was get home before the thunder and lightning broke, get a shower, and relax in coolness and quiet. So I tossed the match book onto the floor of the taxi, and that ended that. Who wrote Death is the Devil’s Stronghold, or why, I have no idea. Its only importance is that it was a first signpost, in a way, on a long and uncertain road.

  The second was waiting inside my front door, lying on the hall table—Air Mail, Special Delivery. It was a dusty-pink envelope postmarked Beverly Hills, addressed in a dashing hand that I recognized at once. I didn’t quite toss it on the hall floor, but I wasn’t in any mad rush to open it. Lucille Gannon’s entire life was Air Mail, Special Delivery—a head of lettuce as urgent as the Greco-Turkish loan, her three marriages contracted and broken and contracted at such breakneck speed, and with such heartless opportunism, or so I’d thought, that it was always a wonder to me her first two husbands were as cut up by her successive departures as they’d been. Her third, George Gannon, an independent producer in Hollywood, seemed made of more lasting stuff, so far.

  I put my packages on the table and went along to the sitting-room off my brick-walled garden. Outside was that unreal glow that comes just before the sun gives up and lets the thunder and the lightning take over. The leaves were already quivering, and downstairs I could hear Lilac, my colored cook, grumbling to Sheila the Irish setter. It seemed to me a perfectly normal late afternoon in Washington as I opened the lipstick-smeared flap of Lucille Gannon’s letter.

  Perhaps it should have done so, but the Darling—you MUST come out here didn’t at all prepare me for what fol
lowed.

  Gee Gee has explained you to the Casa del Rosal, so you can wire them for a room reservation unless you want to stay with us.

  Gee Gee I knew was her latest husband, whom I’d never met. I assumed the Casa del Rosal was a hotel. Why I had to be explained in order to get a room in it was confusing. It was not as confusing as the next sentence. I read it twice before I believed I was seeing it properly.

  Your first-born, whom I love and adore, is making a complete and utter and absolute ass of himself, and with the worst little trollop that ever hit Hollywood and Vine.

  I thought it must be the heat, for a moment. My firstborn was Bill—William A. Latham, aged twenty-two. He was across the room now, on top of my desk, looking at me with a broad grin out of a photo of himself in his white sailor suit before he became a fledgling ensign. It was only a picture, but it was Bill—the grin and the How do I look, Ma? scrawled across one corner—not handsome but a straightforward, honest kid, as little likely to be making an ass of himself over anything as anybody I could imagine. So I wasn’t so much surprised as angry. I think it was the grin on his face, up there across the room, that kept me from tearing the letter in bits then and there. But I thought better of it, after I’d cooled off a little, and started at the beginning. And when I’d finished, I wasn’t either as angry or as sure as I’d been before. In fact, it did look pretty much as if my first-born really was, to all intents and purposes, doing precisely that. Whether it was only in connection with the worst little trollop wasn’t entirely clear. The trollop’s name.

  at any rate, seemed to be Doreen McShane, and according to Lucille Gannon’s letter, if I didn’t get out there, fast, it was going to be Doreen Latham, and moreover Bill would be in prison and I’d be in the poorhouse— all before the cock crowed for another morn.

  I sat there looking across at Bill and at the pigeonhole with his letters, letters grown very thin recently. There’d been no mention of Doreen in them, only the course in aeronautical engineering he said he was sweating at, and would it be all right if he sold another war bond, as living was expensive. I sat there, almost a drowning man, or at least with a lot of my life flashing in front of me— beginning with the plane that reached and stopped at the point of no return, leaving me with two small boys and nobody but Lilac to help bring them up. They were born, as I was, in the house there on P Street, and they’d gone away to school early because I didn’t want them to grow up what Lilac calls “spoilrotten,” with a couple of women waiting on them. I hadn’t married, largely because it seemed to me I had problems enough as it was, and nobody ever appeared that Lilac entirely approved of. And no one worried about it until Colonel John Primrose (92nd Engineers, U.S. Army, Retired) and his self-styled “functotum,” Sergeant Phineas T. Buck (likewise), appeared in our lives one summer at April Harbor on the Chesapeake and changed them completely.

  Up to then, for one thing, I’d known nothing about murder, violent death, and their investigation, which is their present chief concern, and up to then nobody had cared whether I married or not. Nobody had ever said, “Don’t you think, Grace, dear, you really ought to marry him? Hasn’t this gone on long enough, dear?” Not until Colonel Primrose came along. And still nobody’s ever explained what I’d do with Sergeant Buck. You can’t lightly sever a man and his shadow. At least I’d thought I couldn’t. Now I was wondering. Maybe if I’d had one or both of them in the house, Bill would have learned something Lilac and I and a series of schoolmasters couldn’t teach him. Certainly if he’d learned about women from Sergeant Buck he wouldn’t have touched one with a fifty-foot pole. Maybe Lilac and I hadn’t done as good a job as we’d thought.

  I heard her heavy step on the basement-kitchen stairs. She came to the door and stopped, apparently not having heard me come in. “You jus’ sittin’ here, the trees all sheddin’ darkness,” she said. “You mus’ ain’ feelin’ well. … Who that come from?”

  “From Mrs. Gannon.”

  Lilac makes on occasion a sound between a sniff and a snort that’s as damning as all improper words in the language and, like them, can’t be written down.

  “She always got somethin’ to say,” she added. “What she say now?”

  I read the letter to her. With the thunder crashing and the lightning sizzling around, it was a sort of Wagnerian prelude, with a non-Nordic Lilac taking her cue the instant I’d finished.

  “You ain’ even thinkin’ about goin’ out there.”

  I didn’t know what I was thinking. I hadn’t got that far.

  “Ain’ no use to go all that way, child,” she said. “If Bill goin’ to make a fool out of his-self, he goin’ to. If he got wild oats, he got to sow. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. That’s what the preacher say.”

  “He doesn’t say you have to marry them,” I said.

  “If his mind’s set on marryin’, Mis’ Grace, ain’ nothin’ you goin’ to say goin’ to get it off.”

  She stood looking at me for a moment before she went over to the telephone. I didn’t think about who she might be calling until I heard her voice, sweet as honey and smooth as owl’s grease.

  “Mr. Buck? How you, sir? Is th’ Colonel there? You tell him to get his-self over here quick. The madam, she bent on makin’ trouble if somebody don’ stop her.”

  I suppose that’s why I went.

  It’s only when Lilac is being bitterly satirical that sire calls me the madam. With Colonel Primrose on her side, both of them badgering me, I didn’t have much chance to think—not even when Sergeant Buck turned out to be on my side, which in itself should have given me pause.

  He appeared the afternoon I was to take my plane, the last word in spit and polish, even to the gold snake stickpin with ruby eye in the discreet white-spotted black tie he reserves for special occasions, usually at Arlington. He spoke the way he does, out of one side of his lantern jaw, the other side immovable as giant granite.

  “I just want to say, ma’am, you shouldn’t ought to pay no mind to what the Colonel says. He don’t understand what it is to be a mother.”

  I must have looked a little startled. Somehow I hadn’t thought of it quite in those terms.

  “Or if you don’t want to leave the Colonel, ma’am, just say the word. I’ll find out who Bill’s fratranizing with, and if it looks off-color, ma’am, just give me the office. I’ll pick him up and bring him back by the seat of his bri—”

  He broke off, his iron deadpan suffused a rich copper. No doubt “britches” is hardly an expression fit for a mother’s ears. Equally, no doubt, Sergeant Buck could be as good as his word. He could have picked up the Colossus of Rhodes by less than that.

  “I’d better go myself, thank you,” I said hastily.

  “Okay, ma’am.” Sergeant Buck got to the door. “No offense meant, ma’am,” he said.

  “And none taken, Sergeant,” I replied. That, between us, was the plus grande politesse. But I was glad I’d never married his Colonel. If anyone was to take my son by the seat of his britches, Ma was the one to do it.

  Chapter Two: Baby hellcat

  I REGISTERED AT THE CASA DEL ROSAL in Franklin Canyon at 3:30 Wednesday afternoon, Gee Gee having apparently explained me adequately.

  “There’s a message for you, Mrs. Latham,” the clerk said.

  It was from Lucille Gannon, scribbled at top speed on a piece of hotel stationery. Gone to Palm Springs, dear. Back tomorrow. Do nothing—absolutely nothing—till I see you. Terribly important.

  I was hardly surprised there wasn’t any word from Bill Latham. I’d wired him at his boarding-house in Pasadena, not having a list of the local night spots. Until he should happen to turn up to attend a class or two, it was unlikely he’d find out who he had on his trail. It was equally unlikely, I saw, that I’d run into him at the Casa del Rosal. I saw that as I looked at the right-hand side of the menu presented me by a lanky, large, sandy-haired, cheerful young man when I called Room Service for a sandwich and coffee before I started to unpack. No matter what was going
on, I didn’t see how Bill could afford to spend much time in precincts so economically exclusive as these appeared to be.

  What I’d expected a Hollywood hotel to look like I don’t know, unless it was the plush, gold-leaf, black marble job a friend had told me about where they’d spent a stupefying night once. The Casa del Rosal was nothing like that. One story high, it rambled in small, secluded cottage units just below the rim of the Canyon, through a fairyland of flowers and trees. It was glistening white and enchantingly simple, with an unaffected friendliness that extended even to the bellboys and waiters, often the most snobbish of mankind.

  I was aware of it first in the young man waiting to take my order. He was sunburned and freckle-faced, with a cleft chin and big ears and smile-wrinkles fan-shaped at the corners of his blue eyes—the sort of person that just to look at makes you feel the world’s a gayer place than you’d thought. The sleeves of his starched white coat hit about an inch above hairy, bony wrists and his big capable hands looked as though they ought to be doing more productive work than carrying dishes around a Hollywood hotel. I forgot I’d been tired as I gave him my order, and instead of lying down I stepped through the open French windows onto a sun-bleached patio that seemed to belong to me alone. There was a white wrought-iron chaise longue on it, and a table and cushioned chairs. A gorgeous shower of fuchsia in full bloom hung down the whitewashed brick walls on either side. Across the end was an iron railing in front of stone steps going down to the terrace garden below. There was a long vista down the Canyon to where the city lay, shrouded and invisible through its overlying haze. Above the Canyon the sky was a clear, almost Mediterranean, blue. And it was cool. I stood there almost forgetting why I’d come, until I heard the sudden rap on my room door.

  It seemed miraculously quick service. Just the prospect of seeing that grinning, freckled face made me smile as I stepped back across the patio into the room. I said, “Come in,” took off my hat and went across to the closet to put it away. The door opened as I started to reach up to the high shelf—but there was no grinning, freckled face in the mirror that paneled the door into the next suite, directly opposite the hall door. What I saw in it was a girl, a girl with the most violently sultry pair of gray-blue eyes I’ve ever seen in all my life. The pointed, determined chin, flushed, high cheekbones, and slender, erect body were all of a piece, and it was a piece of five feet two inches of sheer, unadulterated tiger cat. She had a flowing mane of tawny hair. The mandarin spears at the ends of her long, sun browned fingers looked as if she’d already ripped something open, and as I stared at her in the mirror there was little doubt in my mind that that was precisely what she wanted to do with me.